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  He took my head in his hands and kissed me quickly on the mouth, the way he had done that first time when I had a flat tire outside Taco Bell.

  “Don't do it again,” I said.

  “I was just about to tell you how happy I am that you are here.”

  “We're in a cemetery, Mulvaney!”

  He bent down and cleared a dead flower from Jim Mulvenna's grave.

  “And do not be glad that I am here, because I am not here!”

  “I am still glad to see you,” he said.

  I looked at the grave. It would be nice if one of these two Mulvaneys made sense.

  “I am glad you are glad,” I said coolly.

  I had to admit that he had gone to an extraordinary amount of trouble, some of it illegal, to get me here. Jim Mulvaney, the surviving one, anyway, was a good-looking man who had wit, nerve, and the ability to make my underpants wet before he'd even touched me. So why didn't he ever do that when it was convenient?

  Now he was trying to do it in the midst of a war zone. In the midst of a war cemetery!

  His war, though, not mine. I could have a romance with Jim Mulvaney if that was all I wanted to have in life. Mulvaney was a full day's work. He was his own story. If I hooked up with him, I'd never write any stories of my own.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “I'm only staying tonight.” This, I realized, was a weakening of my earlier stance. “And I am not sleeping with you.”

  “I just wanted you to have something to think about.”

  How could he imagine I didn't?

  “A book about me should have more tenderness,” my husband says.

  I thought he only wanted sex. And why is he changing the subject? I've brought him the manual so he could write his screenplay, not talk about my book.

  “You're already getting more than most husbands,” I say.

  “All you have to do is revise the latest chapter.”

  Suddenly I understand.

  “Mulvaney!” I say. “We are not going to have sex at the cemetery. I am not going to have sex with Jim Mulvaney at Jim Mulvenna's grave.”

  “If my relatives hadn't come to America, I could have been him.”

  “Mulvaney, a scene like that at Jim Mulvenna's grave would be a shoo-in for the Worst Sex Writing of the Year contest.”

  “A lot of famous writers have won that contest.”

  He needs to be stopped. “I'll tell people that I write bad sex because I have bad sex.”

  His eyes turn blue like the horizon.

  He has, I know, devised a compelling, although not verifiable, counterargument.

  “They'll know you made it up.”

  “And why is that?”

  “When sex is really great, you don't remember anything.”

  I stare back at him. No matter what Jim Mulvaney thinks, he is not the only genius in the universe. “Okay. I admit it. I don't want to write that scene because I can't. I can't remember anything at all about having sex with you. I do not think there is a wife on earth who remembers less.”

  If you ask me, it is convoluted logic that keeps most marriages alive.

  CHAPTER 21

  Cold Bed, Cold Heart

  Suzie McBreeze's brick house on Owenvarragh Park, off the Andersonstown Road, would have looked at home on Avenue I, even if it was smaller in scale, attached, and not across the street from any shul. With its front garden, modest hedges, and climbing ivy, it too had striver's notions.

  Mulvaney screeched his T-Bird brakes in the narrow driveway. Suzie's house reminded him, he said, of the place in Queens where he lived when he was the Short Paperboy. “We never had British soldiers in Hollis, though.”

  Mulvaney had his own key. Inside, the McBreeze daughters watched black-and-white television in a minuscule living room; Suzie had stayed on at the Felons Club, hopeful that Mother's Night would really become one.

  “Wood?” I asked, sniffing smoke.

  “Peat,” Mulvaney said.

  It had been warmer outside.

  BBC News blasted through the frigid, blurry air. The girls sat, nearly motionless, on a tattered couch, the one, I guessed, my mother had so valiantly offered to rehabilitate along with several Project Children kids.

  Suzie's couch was, indeed, the hobo king of couches, lumpy as oatmeal, covered with patchwork rather than upholstery. Swatches overlapped so that stripes ran into swirls into polka dots, all of them awful and, in keeping with what I could now identify as local tradition, tinged with olive green. Even her daughters, in layers of bulky sweaters, could not camouflage it, beautiful though they were. The youngest sipped from a bottle of orange soda while she plucked out pieces of gray stuffing. The eldest bent over the middle child and gave her a gentle slap on the wrist. “Mummy told you it's dangerous to do that!”

  “Yew sound like a fookin' Peeler,” the little one said.

  The big sister—thirteen, I guessed—held her hand up and was about to slap the little girl again when she turned, saw me, and flipped off the television.

  “That yer sweetie, Jimmy Mulvenna?” she asked. Even the kids had known his plan.

  I was introduced to the McBreeze girls from eldest to youngest—Aisling, Suzannah, Bridget—a conglomeration of blond hair, curled and straight; strategically placed freckles; and long limbs in need of athletic fields. I couldn't imagine any of them growing up to look like their mother. But how early did the women here start to fall apart? We crowded together in the living room. A photograph of a balding, distant man stood on a small end table, next to the potbelly. A brick of peat simmered slowly through its grated door.

  “Suzie's husband,” Mulvaney said.

  Martin McBreeze, in a crew cut and white button-down short-sleeved shirt, could, indeed, have been at IBM instead of in the IRA, if the immigration process had only touched his family, too. Now, though—hair and shirt notwithstanding—I could only picture him on the run in America, hiding perhaps under Dan Tubridy's sink.

  Above Martin hung a photograph of a handsome teenage boy in a school uniform. “Our Kieran's doing his time,” Suzannah, the middle child, informed me. “He burned down a bus.”

  “Mummy says it was because he misses our da,” Bridget, the youngest, added as she brushed a waft of couch stuffing from her sweater.

  Next to their incarcerated brother, inside a frame made from a miniature carved harp, there was a gleaming new photograph of Suzie—and Mulvaney—with Peter King, the Nassau County Comptroller, a Long Island Republican, who happened to be an Irish Republican as well. King, certain he could broker a peace deal, visited Northern Ireland frequently even though any number of Protestant paramilitaries had threatened to kill him.

  The girls invited me to sit on the couch. As I did, one of the swatches fell to the floor, exposing more stuffing.

  “This couch is a mortification,” Aisling said as she squeezed next to me.

  “My mother's is worse,” I said.

  Mulvaney motioned with his eyes to meet him in an alcove that turned out to be the kitchen, tinier than the living room and reeking of cooking fat. It had a sink, a small icebox, a cooker but no oven, and a heavy mahogany cabinet that didn't belong. He moved the cabinet aside to reveal a door.

  Behind it was a sliver of a room. The floor was covered, Mulvaney-style, with old newspapers, half-filled cups of tea—no coffee here?—reporter's notebooks, discarded plaid shirts, and a camera that I bet had no film.

  We stood, facing one another, in front of a small window. I pulled up the blind. Nothing else you could do without involving the bed, even if it was a single.

  “Need a nap?” he asked, moving forward.

  I moved back, almost tripping over his doctor's bag.

  “Make the bed warm,” he said, leaving me there.

  Traveling for one day and drinking for two had not been a restful combination. Neither was meeting the IRA, living or dead. Mulvaney returned with two glasses of whiskey. I could barely stand. But I was not going to sit on that bed.

  “Is tha
t Powers?” I asked him, taking one and gulping.

  “Why?”

  “Suzie said that Powers makes men mean.”

  “You believe that?” He looked prepared to be anything but mean.

  “No, I don't believe that,” I said.

  “What do you believe, then?”

  I took another large gulp. “I believe that you are many things, Mulvaney. But not mean.”

  “What else?”

  “Even whiskey couldn't make you mean. But it also couldn't make you any crazier.”

  “What else?”

  “I believe that it is almost summer here and freezing and I want to go to Paris.”

  “What else?” His blue eyes gleamed like a man who expected the answer he wanted.

  I didn't know.

  He followed me back into the kitchen.

  “Here,” he said, handing me my knapsack. I checked and, yes, the wallet and passport were inside. “But I hope,” he said, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, “that you don't go.”

  I looked around to see if any PR men had been asked to stand guard.

  Upstairs, the McBreezes had three small bedrooms, but the girls and their mother slept together in one.

  I flopped on a bed in one of the empty rooms and felt nothing until I woke hours later but still before dawn, my fingers and toes numb from the cold, my body shaking in an icy fever. I'd never felt chilled like this, not even in the dead of a New York January. If I was going to copulate out of the faith, I should have picked a man whose ancestors came from a warmer climate. New York was crawling with men with Italian last names. I could have been in Florence.

  I slid my knapsack out from under the pillow, put on my carry-on sweater, but felt no warmer.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “move over.” I put my knapsack down at the side of his bed, lifted off his blanket, and saw he was naked. How did he survive this?

  Shivering, I examined his setup.

  Mulvaney was plugged in.

  And he'd called me a princess?

  This had to be the only electric blanket in the house.

  He didn't wake, so I pushed him. He moved. I got in and carefully placed my cold feet between his warm legs. He grunted and groaned. In his sleep he tried to put his hand inside my jeans. I pulled it out.

  “Mulvaney,” I said, “this arrangement is climatic.”

  Not climactic.

  But I dreamed of him. I dreamed he had been arrested for bootlegging all the whiskey in Ireland, North and South. Not a political crime. But it was, as the song goes, a capital offense. The electric chair. Sans blanket.

  As they dragged him out of the courtroom, in handcuffs and chains, to meet his Maker, he told the bewigged judge that if it wasn't for me he would not have needed any whiskey at all.

  I woke to his hand back in my jeans.

  “Is it okay?” he asked.

  “Only because you have a death sentence,” I said, not sure if I meant it.

  Sex for Siding (resumed)

  I go downstairs, freeze.

  Finally, I walk out into the sunshine.

  And across the street.

  “So you would like to learn,” the contractor says.

  “Actually,” I say, “I'd be more interested in having someone do it for me.”

  Now the contractor does turn from his work. The lines around his green eyes crinkle and I remember a professor I once knew.

  “For you?” he says.

  “Yes, a favor.”

  He says nothing.

  “Do you think that's possible?” I ask.

  “I think that's very possible,” he says. “But nothing fake.”

  “I don't fake.”

  “Not even fake Victorian?”

  “I despise fake Victorian.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “I also despise real Victorian,” I say.

  He crinkles again. “I know.”

  CHAPTER 22

  A Nice Irish Doctor

  I started, with Mulvaney's help, to take off my clothes.

  So I must have meant what I said.

  Suddenly, metal crashed against metal.

  “We're being bombed,” I noted.

  Unimpressed, he tossed my jeans on his growing heap of floor detritus. “It's just bin lids. Garbage can tops. The women bang them when the Brits are coming.”

  The noise was deafening. “They should try reciting Longfellow.”

  He tossed my underpants on the floor.

  “It worked for the Americans,” I added.

  Approaching sirens drowned out the metal; heavy automotive machinery clanged in harmony.

  As he leaned in, a lone female voice resounded through the noise. “How dare you harass these fine people because of their religion! Brits out of Northern Ireland!”

  I jumped out of bed.

  “And don't think you can scare me. I, too, come from a place where . . .”

  Across the street, framed in the window, my mother stood in front of an armored car. Two young soldiers trained their rifles on her. Undeterred, she railed on.

  “A place where people were killed because of the way they worshipped!”

  The black taxi that I guessed had delivered her into the midst of the raid—my mother's impeccable timing now an international phenomenon—sideswiped two army jeeps, ran up the sidewalk, turned, and sped away.

  I pulled on my clothes. “Mulvaney,” I said as I slammed the door on his den of iniquity and clutter, “this is all your fault!”

  Suzie, still in a nightgown and pink curlers, ran out the front, just ahead of me. “Do not shoot my mother!” I cried, bursting outside on her heels.

  “Barbara!” my mother said as I grabbed her. “Don't be silly.” She shook a perfectly manicured red fingernail. “They can't shoot me. I'm an American.”

  The two rifles were now aimed at the three of us.

  From the neighbors' house, a teenage boy in pajamas was shoved out at gunpoint by two more soldiers. The bin lids had died down but now they started up again in earnest.

  “Religious persecution!” my mother shouted. “Do your mothers know what you are doing?”

  “Ma'am,” one of the soldiers said, “I'll have to ask you to move on.” He had sparse brown stubble on his face, as if he had to work at growing a beard.

  “Sonny,” my mother said, “I will do no such thing.”

  The soldier ordered the three of us into Suzie's house. My mother followed Suzie with her fist raised to the sky, her diamond engagement ring—her own symbol of triumph over adversity—glaring up at the puffy Belfast clouds. It still hadn't poured and the bin lidders hadn't stopped banging. Either there were more Brits coming or these people felt solidarity with my mother, further proof of their misguided passions.

  “Troublemaking American gunrunners!” the soldier said.

  What was he talking about? The soldiers were the only ones who had any guns.

  And where the hell was Mulvaney?

  The stubbly soldier ordered his partner, a boy with sweaty freckles, to guard us in the living room while he ran upstairs, his boots pounding on the creaky steps. No sound of Suzie's daughters. Mulvaney, I hoped, was hiding them in his room.

  “Can I use yer loo?” The freckled boy was now soaked in his own sweat.

  Suzie nodded and pointed toward a small room at the far end of the hallway.

  “Good,” my mother said. “Let's escape.” From upstairs we heard dull thuds on the floor as the soldier took apart Suzie's beds. “At least two soldiers still outside,” Suzie warned her. “Could be more by now.”

  My mother eyed the couch. “Then we might as well redecorate.”

  “Maybe not now, Ida,” Suzie said.

  “Why don't we just try this fabric on that cushion?”

  Suzie gasped as my mother lifted a sheath of material off the couch, uncovering bare yellowed stuffing. She grabbed at the stuffing, and three black matte pistols, wired together by their trigger guards, came up with it.<
br />
  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” said my Jewish mother, who'd been in Ireland less than forty-eight hours. The door to the loo creaked open. Outside, it began to pour. My mother stuffed the guns back in the couch. Boots creaked on the steps.

  By the time the soldiers returned to the living room, my mother was lying across the couch.

  “Up!” the stubbly one ordered her. “We have to search all cushions!”

  “Just a minute while I get my old bones to move,” she murmured.

  “Now!” the soldier repeated. He lurched a baby step closer.

  At that my mother began to wheeze, as she had done on the airplane, an act I did not expect would work twice in the same war zone. “She's very sick,” I said. “If she moves, she could die. If she dies, it could have global implications.”

  Someone pounded on the front door. “Answer it!” the soldier ordered.

  The man at the door was Mulvaney. But a Mulvaney transformed by pinstripes.

  “Nice suit,” I said. I couldn't imagine where Mulvaney got such an outfit, or, more curiously, how it stayed pressed if he wore it in the rain.

  “Mu—” I said.

  He put a hand on my mouth. “Talk softly. It's better for your health.” His blue eyes shifted down to the bag he carried. The bag the medical examiners had given him. He stepped inside and turned to the soldiers.

  “Doctor,” I said, wondering if I could make him a Jewish doctor. My mother would at least die happy. “Let me take your bag.” I grabbed it out of his hand, turned it so that the Long Island coroner's shield was on the inside.

  Mulvaney saw that. “No need,” he said, taking the bag back the way I handed it to him.

  “My mother is too sick to move.”

  He nodded.

  She wheezed, coughed, stopped. Then she gazed up at Mulvaney, who said nothing. He apparently had everything except a script.

  “You will have to move off this couch, ma'am.” The solider rubbed his embryonic beard.